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South Korea’s rollback of democracy

Candlelight protests in Seoul, June 10, 2008.

By George Katsiaficas

May 25, 2009 -- The suicide of former South Korean president
Roh Moo-hyun on May 23, 2009, left South Korea in shock. All over the country, tens of
thousands of tearful people sought to eulogise and memorialise Roh — to find
ways to express their grief and anger. Conservative government politicians were
blocked by local residents from joining tens of thousands people who made the
journey to Roh’s small hometown the day he died. Not only were they refused
admittance, many people splashed them with water and chanted that they should
get out — shaming them into leaving. Opposition party spokesperson Kim Yu-jeong
expressed what is in many people’s hearts when he blamed Roh’s tragic death on
the conservative government’s relentless and disrespectful offensive against
him: “The people and history know what made the former president do something
so tragic.”

Police form a cordon around the Deoksugung Palace
on

May 23, 2009, where a spontaneous memorial for Roh was erected.

During his
presidency Roh had often compared himself to Abraham Lincoln. Both men owed
their education to diligent home schooling and sought to bring new progressive
policies to their countries. While Lincoln’s life was taken by an assassin’s bullet,
Roh’s tragic fate is being seen as no less tied to vengeful attackers. A former
aide declared, “The late President Roh had appeared to be exhausted from the
prosecutors’ investigation.” Despite many people’s outrage with the
conservative Lee Myung-bak government’s stranglehold on the nation’s democracy,
police buses encircled a memorial site in Seoul for former president Roh, and riot squads
refused to open their cordon of buses, compelling thousands of people bringing
incense and prayers to line up through subway stations. Nearly 1000 police were
deployed in front of the memorial at DeoksugungPalace; altogether over 8000 police were sent
into the streets for crowd control.[1]

Trade union leader Park
Jong-tae committed suicide on May 3, 2009.

In 2008, South Korea's suicide rate was already counted as the
highest among OECD members, but Roh’s suicide is the second in recent weeks
believed to have resulted directly from Lee Myung-bak’s pursuit of all who do
not march in lockstep with his programs and policies. On May 3, union leader
Park Jong-tae, head of Korea Cargo Transport Workers’ Union (KCTWU) in Kwangju,
killed himself to protest the unilateral firing without discussion of 78
delivery drivers for the Kwangju branch of Korea Express (which has the largest
number of labour union members in Korea Express). Labour Minister Lee Young-hee
publicly ridiculed Park’s suicide, saying at a press conference that he did not
think the labour conflict was significant enough to end one’s life over.[2]

Despite his
status as labour minister, Lee has refused to agree to engage in dialogue with
the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the KCTWU. Adding that holding
talks with groups engaging in “illegal acts” like demonstrations, Lee’s remarks
were echoed by President Lee Myung-Bak’s similar refusal to agree to speak
directly with trade union leaders. On the contrary, police announced that they
have applied for the arrest warrants for seven union leaders who led the
memorial rallies for Park Jong-tae in Daejeon on May 6. Ten days later, at
least 457 workers were arrested at a demonstration there when 15,000 union
members gathered to mourn Park and demand reinstatement of the fired delivery drivers.
According to the legal director of the KCTWU, after police recklessly attacked
the dispersing demonstrators, they arrested even people who were eating dinner
or on their way home.[3]

The new Lee
Myung-bak administration has wasted little time in seeking to roll back the
clock of progressive democratic reforms won by South Koreans through decades of
arduous struggles. Ten years of progressive administrations under Presidents
Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun resulted not only in more liberties but also in higher
standards of living for many people. Although progressive presidents embraced
neoliberal policies, turning more than 50% of all Korean workers into
part-timers and thereby creating a widening division between rich and poor,
they also legalised autonomous trade unions, worked out a tripartite system (of
business, labour, and government) to manage industrial relations, and permitted
a wide range of protests. The Lee Myung-bak administration seeks to undo many
of the policies of its progressive predecessors.

Fifteen days
after the inauguration of the Lee Myung-bak administration in January 2008,
government officials forcibly removed members of a part-time workers’ union
from an ongoing sit-in demonstration. The new Lee Myung-bak government released
leaders of chaebol (the giant
corporations that control much of the South Korean economy) convicted of
corruption and imprisoned under President Roh Moo-hyun, stepped up prosecution
of immigrant workers who overstayed their visas, and designed a new Seoul police unit of 1700 specially trained
riot police. President Lee plans to replace the 40,000 strong police force
filled with military conscripts with a more streamlined version — to which he
will add 14,000 more elite men. For many people, this policy, like many others
of the Lee Myung-bak government, resembles those of disgraced former dictator
(and Lee Myung-bak’s friend) Chun Doo-hwan. (In this case, Lee’s plan resembles
the Baekgoldan — white skull corps — established by Chun.)

Under Roh
Moo-hyun’s leadership, enormous strides were made investigating tens of
thousands of state-sanctioned murders during the Cold War. On the island of Jeju, for example, where more than 30,000
people were massacred beginning in 1948 under the auspices of a US military government, Roh twice apologised
and named Jeju a “peace island.” The Lee Myung-bak government has reopened the
wounds on Jeju by insisting some of the victims were, in fact, communists — and
presumably should have been killed then. Lee Myung-bak abolished the official
commission investigating Korean collaborators during Japanese colonial rule and
marginalised others looking into human rights abuses by past dictators. In
August 2008, the government announced its decision to build 11 more nuclear
power plants by 2030 and proposed a Grand Canal to cut across the peninsula — both of which have
been termed ecological nightmares. When popular protests against his canal
scheme forced him publicly to promise not to build it, he nonetheless continues
to scheme the project’s continuation through a revised “four rivers plan.” Lee
Myung-bak criminalised organisers of peaceful candlelight protests, and ordered
his police to search for them even in the car of a high-ranking Buddhist leader
in Seoul, leading to protests by more than 200,000 Buddhists.[4] He has so
brainlessly pursued his own misplaced agenda that high school girls who led
months of candlelight protests against his agreement to import US beef without
restriction dubbed him “2MB” — the slowest operating speed of a modern
computer, as well as a play on his family name, which also means two.

Of all the
troubling initiatives undertaken by the Lee Myung-bak government, none is more
unsettling than its offensive against the media. In July 2008, MBC television
producers were taken to court for alleged exaggerations in a documentary on US
beef imports, and when they refused to show up, over the next ten months, they
were arrested one by one as they went about their daily lives (including a
bride-to-be planning her wedding). In August, the KBS president was forced to
resign — even briefly detained — and replaced with Lee’s crony. A friend of the
president was named to head ArirangEnglish channel. The 24-hour all-news cable station YTN
was sent a new president. When union leaders and members sought to block him
from coming to work, police intervened. Union leaders were repeatedly summoned
for questioning. Even though they complied four times, they were arrested. The
internet also came under close scrutiny. On July 24, Google Korea came under
pressure from the government, confirming it had been pressured to delete two
pieces of video footage showing the brother of National Police Commissioner
managing a hotel that allowed prostitution.[5] Minerva, a blogger who had
correctly reported on the global crisis and embarrassed the government by
revealing its incompetent handling of the economy, was tracked down and
prosecuted (although subsequently exonerated). After the government implemented
new restrictive requirements for internet postings, in early May 2009, internet
writer and poet Yang Hyung-ku was arrested on charges of violating the National
Security Law. Yang had posted hundreds of articles, including a few dozen
advocating a federation model for Korean unification and Juche thought.[6]

The president
and his cronies may be free to pressure the media, but when ordinary citizens
do so, it is evidently a crime. A citizens’ boycott against the country’s
conservative newspapers (Chosun Ilbo,
JoongAng Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo)
was declared illegal, and charges filed against its internet organisers. Their
passports were seized. The government's attempt to control the media is so
intense that it has criminalised even citizens who hold press conferences. “New
Right” ideologues are delighted. Fashioning themselves after US
neoconservatives, they revised newly rewritten textbooks that broke ground by
denying the role of the democracy movement in the country’s progress. The New
Right helped produce an “updated” government history video, distributed widely
to school teachers, which did not include mention of the Kwangju Uprising as
part of South Korean democratisation. Ahead of a formal investigation, Lee
Myung-bak’s New Right supporters have already labelled the entire 1948 Jeju
Uprising communist as part of their more general campaign to revive the “red
complex”.

One reason for
the Lee Myung-bak government’s attacks on media and revision of history is to
cover their new closeness with Japan. For ten years, progressive
administrations cultivated ties with China — now South Korea’s main trading partner. Lee Myung-bak
seeks to undo that legacy and reorient the country closer to Japan — following in the footsteps of both Park
Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. Born in Japan where he used the name Akihiro Tsukiyama,
Lee Myung-bak has personally met every month with the Japanese prime minister.
He refuses to tolerate even mild-mannered protests against his Japanese
friends. On December 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, his government sent six buses of riot police to
dismantle a peaceful protest by former “comfort women” and their supporters in
front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Although the weekly one-hour vigils have
gone on since 1992, the government declared the rally illegal because no one
had applied for a permit. Furthermore, the police now insist no demonstration
can come within 300 metres of the Japanese embassy.

On January
12, 2009, at his
monthly summit with Japanese Prime Minister Aso, Lee announced that Mitsubishi
Heavy Industries, a Japanese company which has ignored demands of hundreds of
Korean women to be paid for forced labour during the period of Japanese colonisation,
was selected to launch a South Korean satellite in 2011. Although South Korea’s trade deficit with Japan is expected to be above US$32 billion in
2008 and Mitsubishi rejected technology transfer as part of its offer, Lee
personally ordered the change in the contract from a Russian company, which had
included technology transfer. Lee was reported to be in favour of
“strengthening South Korea’s economic relationship with Japan to shake off its blow from the global
financial crisis”.[7]

At a time when
China is the region’s rising economic
powerhouse and Japan has been mired in economic doldrums for a
decade, Lee Myung-bak rivals Inspector Cousteau in finding clues on how to
carry the South Korean economy forward. Of course, he is not alone in his
adulation of Japan. Others see in South Korea a “facsimile”
of Japan, “a superior, homogeneous nation uniquely fit among Asians to the
tasks of the modern world”.[8] Cooperating with Japan against North Korea is a
shameful action for any Korean patriot, but the president makes no apologies — leading
many people to question his loyalties.

Clearly, Lee
Myung-bak admires former US president George W. Bush. On April
19, 2008, only a
few months after he became president, he visited Bush at Camp David. After driving the presidential golf cart
around the compound, Lee promised that evening to lift Seoul’s five-year ban on US beef — setting off months of candlelight
vigils that compelled him subsequently to modify his capitulation to US demands
for unlimited exports. “What he did was little different from an ancient Korean
king offering tribute to a Chinese emperor,” commented homemaker Kim Sook-yi.
“This time we give tribute to Washington?”[9]

Lee Myung-bak
continues to emulate Bush-era policies, even though they have been disastrous
for the US and the world economy. After Lee
Myung-bak’s first minister of economics was compelled to resign for his
incompetence, his replacement has been even more forceful in pushing tax cuts
for the rich, privatising the public sector (including in education and health
care), expanding labour market “flexibility” (i.e. part-time work with no
benefits), and relaxing business and financial regulations.

“MB-nomics” [Lee
Myung-bak is commonly referred to as ``MB’’] has slashed wages for new
employees and seeks to extend the two-year cap for temporary workers as well to
shrink current restrictions on hiring of part-time employees.

Not only has
the Lee Myung-bak administraion alienated North Korea (which recently nullified the contract
for the Kaesong Industrial Complex and accelerated its nuclear program), but Lee
Myung-bak’s stubborn imposition of his cronies in high positions has also
opened a wide split within the conservative party. True to his nickname, “the
bulldozer”, Lee Myung-bak refuses to compromise with any of his critics — even
within his own party. Instead he and the New Right are opening a new era in South
Korean politics, in which forceful implementation of unpopular and questionable
policies runs roughshod over dissent and chews up anyone standing in its path.

On May 20,
2009, during a press conference presided over by Prime Minster Han Seung-soo,
the government announced its unilateral decision to discontinue permits for
large demonstrations in cities and empowered police to arrest anyone committing
the now-illegal act of meeting in public. In Prime Minister Han’s words, “The
government intends to counter illegal strikes and violent demonstrations that
could have negative effects on the nation’s economy. To reach the level of an
advanced nation, it is necessary to correct the backwardness of our
demonstration culture.”[10]

The threat
posed by Lee Myung-bak to South Korea’s economic wellbeing, political progress
and democratic liberties is grave. With little or no opposition in the National
Assembly, extra-parliamentary forces will continue to mobilise against him no
matter how much he seeks to criminalise even the mildest forms of public
dissent.

[George
Katsiaficas is a visiting professor at ChonnamNationalUniversity in Kwangju, where he is finishing a two-volume
study, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings. His
web site is at http://www.eroseffect.com,
where this article first appeared.]